Shinkyu Park joins MIT Senseable City Lab as postdoc

Shinkyu Park (EE Ph.D. 2015) has started a postdoctoral research appointment in the Senseable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also will be affiliated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory there.

Shinkyu is working on the Underworlds research project, designing a distributed robotic system to examine wastewater in the sewage network. One of the primary aims in this project is to extract information on human health and behavior from sewage samples collected by the designed system. As the system is deployed near the points where human stools are first released in the sewage network, the researchers expect to gather sewage samples that contain human microbiomes at an unprecedented level. These findings and data will be used to shape public health strategies and to study urban epidemiology.

At Maryland, Park was advised by Associate Professor Nuno Martins (ECE/ISR) and wrote his thesis on “Distributed Decision Making in Cyber-Physical Systems.”

Immediately after earning his Ph.D., Park was a postdoctoral researcher for Martins’ project on animal-borne monitoring systems, where he designed control algorithms for autonomous operation of systems that monitor animal behavior. He also conducted research on the statistical modeling and classification of animal group motion.

As a graduate student, Park performed a deployment of the animal monitoring system at the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, as a part of a joint University of Maryland/National Geographic Crittercam Group project.

About the Senseable City Laboratory
The laboratory uses layers of networks and "big data" derived from digital information to create new approaches to the study of the built environment in urban spaces. It aims to create tools to transform the way cities are described and understood, and to anticipate changes and study them from a critical point of view. It combines insights from design, planning, engineering, physics, biology and social science. Examples of projects include MONiTOUR, which recently has been used to track the travel of e-waste across the world after supposedly "responsible" disposal; and A Tale of Many Cities, which explores the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile phone activity in cities across the world.

Published June 17, 2016